The Cold War (36 page)

The president added, “The United States forgets neither God nor the soldier upon which we now depend.”

But three decades later, we have almost forgotten the great invasion that
never happened—forgotten it, perhaps, because we never really knew how awesome it would have been.

EPILOGUE

Surprises—and for the U.S., the discovery of missiles in Cuba was one—have a way of generating more surprises, not all of them pleasant. What might have happened if American troops had invaded Cuba? American troops probably would have gone in on Tuesday, October 30, had Khrushchev and Kennedy not made their last-minute deal over the previous weekend. Since Cuba was too far from the Soviet Union to be reinforced by conventional means, the only sure protection for the Russian troops on the island was tactical nuclear weapons, in the form of twelve short-range
Luna
rockets (or FROGS, as they were known in the U.S.) that carried a two-kiloton charge. Their effect on a Cuban beach or an invasion flotilla just offshore would have been awesome. “Assuming that the
Luna
was aimed to detonate in the air,” the historians Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali write,

Robert McNamara, then the secretary of defense, later described the
Luna
missiles as “the most dangerous element of the entire episode.”

For all America's technological supremacy from the air, intelligence on the ground remained flawed (and still is). Estimates indicated that there were only 10,000 Soviet troops in Cuba; there were 42,000, many of them belonging to crack combat units. A mere 10,000 presented little problem. Plus, the American troops preparing for the invasion were not given the tactical nuclear weapons they normally would have carried. The planners, understandably, did not want to risk escalation, especially if the invasion force came up against Soviet detachments, as it surely would. Khrushchev had originally given his
commanders in Cuba oral authorization to use tactical nuclear weapons if an invasion began and they were unable to reach Moscow “to confirm permission.” But once Kennedy had announced the discovery of missiles in Cuba, the Soviet premier rescinded the order: Neither tactical nor strategic weapons could be fired without Moscow's explicit approval. This assumed, and it was a perilous assumption, that Soviet commanders would not take matters into their own hands, as they did when they ordered SAM antiaircraft missiles to shoot down Major Rudolf Anderson's U-2. The Soviet submarines that ranged around the island presented a similar danger. Many of them were armed with nuclear-tipped torpedoes; their captains were authorized to fire them if their hulls were breached. And what if a couple of IRBMs had escaped American bombs long enough to be armed, fueled, and launched toward the continental U.S.? That ultimate nuclear resort would have invited American retaliation in kind. Curtis LeMay's SAC bombers would have been heading for the U.S.S.R.; ICBMs would have lifted off from their underground silos. That, of course, is the worst-case scenario.

Nor can the potentially influential role of Fidel Castro be dismissed: He was another wild card. As he said at the 1992 Havana conference on the Cuban Missile Crisis:

There is no telling how elite troops, with pride and revolutionary principles at stake, would have acted in a moment of desperation—presumably after they had run through their
Luna
s. “We were all ready and willing to fight to the very last man,” General Anatoly I. Gribkov, the former head of the Warsaw Pact, who had been in Cuba, said at the same Havana conference. “We didn't just plan an initial resistance. We even decided that if it proved necessary—if large tracts of the island were occupied—we would form guerrilla units in order to
continue defending the interests of revolutionary Cuba. I'm using the very words that we used in 1962. That's the way we were then. We did not have anywhere to withdraw to. No retreat was possible.”

There were other possibilities, of course, as Gaddis has pointed out. “Perhaps the Americans would have refrained from pressing the attack, thereby allowing the Russians a graceful exit. Perhaps Khrushchev would have tolerated Castro's overthrow and the Red Army's humiliation. Perhaps Kennedy still would have cut a deal. Perhaps—but all sides are fortunate, in retrospect, not to have had to rely upon these counterfactuals becoming fact.”

Let us speculate that the invasion had gone smoothly, that the Soviets had refrained from firing their
Luna
s, and that the island had been overrun in reasonably short order. American military planning can be spectacular in the short term. But no firm plans had been made for the future of Cuba when a successful invasion had been completed. It was a potential source for trouble, as it has been in Iraq. Let us finally recall Brugioni's prescient sentences: “Although there were generalized plans for the occupation and a military government, there was no detailed plan for the recruitment of indigenous Cuban administrators. Nor were there plans to prevent starvation, disease, or civil unrest. When asked whether it had the funds to deal with such likely calamities, the State Department replied that ‘none had been budgeted.’”

THOMAS B. ALLEN

The simulation of battle through war games, Thomas B. Allen observes, has probably existed as long as organized warfare itself. The games go back at least as far as that dim past that saw the creation of the Asian go, the Hindu
chaturanga,
and chess, which with its king, queen bishop, knight, castle, and peasant pawn mimicked the conditions of medieval warfare. In 1797 a German tactician named Georg Venturini invented
kriegsspiel
—“war game”—which was played in military schools, its 3,600 squares representing the territory along the border with northern France; the rules of play were set out in a sixty-page book that, with time, increased in size. In 1824, watching his junior officers play
kriegsspiel,
the chief of the Prussian General Staff commented, “It's not a game at all! It's training for war.”

Under Rear Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan, the esteemed strategist who headed the Naval War College in Newport, RI, “naval
kriegsspiel
” became part of the school's curriculum. It still is, although it has evolved from the days when blue-water encounters were played out on huge checkerboards. War games, both military and naval, came to utilize computers, although in the Vietnam years, they began to fall out of favor. Vice Admiral Hyman G. Rickover, known as “the father of the nuclear submarine,” criticized computer-based systems analysis in war games. “On a cost effectiveness basis,” he told a congressional hearing in 1966, “the colonists would not have revolted against George III…. Computerlogic would have advised the British to make terms with Hitler in 1940.” Rickover went on to note that “A war, small or large, does not follow a prescribed ‘scenario’ laid out in advance. If we could predict the
sequence of events accurately, we could probably avoid war in the first place.”

This was the time of the Vietnam War, and the army colonel and military historian Harry G. Summers, Jr., recounted a story that had circulated in 1969, as the Nixon administration was taking over. All the vast data on North Vietnam, from population and gross national product to number of tanks and size of its armed forces, had been fed into a computer. The computer was then asked, “When will we win?”

The computer needed only a moment to answer: “You won in 1964.”

Much preferred these days is a simpler form of war gaming that emphasizes the decisions people must make under the extreme conditions of war. Until the Cold War ended, players would be assigned to a U.S. Blue Team and a Soviet-bloc Red Team, with a Control Team presenting the opening scenario, fielding questions, or presenting new ones. The control team also does its best to prevent players from manipulating reality. For example, navy players often decline to sink aircraft carriers. Mark Herman, a well-known game creator, told Allen that there are “three words that do not belong in the military lexicon: unsinkable, unbreakable, and indestructible.” All the participants sit at a long table; the windowless walls are decorated with maps. “The important aspect of any war game is the players,” Herman said, adding that if you put the right ones at the table, they may come up with scenarios that are both realistic and useful. Games last as long as four or five days, from eight in the morning until four in the afternoon. (The Soviets were also fierce war gamers, although because of rigid distinctions between politicians and the military, civilians ordinarily did not participate, so their games tended to be more strictly tactical in nature.)

Allen has compared war games to autopsies: “They have great value in showing the living why certain actions can be fatal.” In a game, expensive lessons can come cheaply. One participant recalled a game in which a high-ranking official got so caught up in the terrors of crisis management that he suddenly rose from the table and threw up in a wastebasket. That was during the Vietnam era, a time when such people had every right to feel queasy.

The article that follows describes what surely has to be one of the most bizarre war games ever played. It took place at the beginning of December
1962, a little over a month after the Cuban Missile Crisis ended (but two years before most people took our involvement in Vietnam seriously). That week, you might say, a group of “fresh and uninhibited” celebrity minds entered the Fifth Dimension in Room 1D-957 of the vast Pentagon basement.

THOMAS B. ALLEN has written on a wide variety of military subjects. His books include
War Games
and
Remember Pearl Harbor
. He is coauthor, with Norman Polmar, of
World War II: America at War; Why Truman Dropped the Atomic Bomb on Japan;
and
Spy Book: The Encyclopedia of Espionage
. His most recent book (with Paul Dickson) is
The Bonus Army: An American Epic
. Allen lives in Bethesda, Maryland.

A
S ROD SERLING USED TO SAY
, “There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is an area we call the Twilight Zone.” And once, in real life, the popular television dramatist took the Pentagon into
The Twilight Zone
.

Imagine, if you will, Serling in Room 1D-957 in the basement of the Pentagon for five days at the end of 1962, at the invitation of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He and other civilians have been asked to participate in a series of games in which they are developing secret scenarios of America's future. Urged on by high-ranking military officers, the civilians are producing their own Twilight Zone: The Soviet Union conquers the United States; in a face-to-face confrontation with Nikita Khrushchev, President Barry Goldwater poises his finger over a nuclear button. But sometimes their fantasies are eerily prophetic: The president is impeached; the shah of Iran is toppled and flees into exile.

Besides Serling, the Olympians (as game reports call them) include Milton Caniff, the creator of the comic-strip hero Steve Canyon; John Ford, the Oscarwinning director whose classics included movies set in every American conflict from the Revolution to World War II; mystery writer Harold Q. Masur; and representatives from organized labor and industry. All the players have signed nondisclosure statements and have been told to say, if asked why they are in Washington, simply that they are “attending a conference.” The games are highly secret, as is the existence of the Joint War Games Control Group of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, which manages the games. Serling and the others have been invited to the Pentagon to play Olympiad 1-62, a series of politico-military war games that start on Monday, December 3, 1962, and end on Friday, December 7—a date that seems a bit freighted with irony.

Such policy-planning games, imported from academia early in the Kennedy administration, still go on today. The players in these games usually are military officers and middle-level or high-ranking civilian officials drawn from the Department of Defense, the Department of State, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the White House.

In a typical war game, the thirty to thirty-five players are divided into player and Control Teams. Each team is put in a room that contains little more than a long table, chairs, and equipment for viewing videotapes. On the walls are maps (usually the sort published by the National Geographic Society) and whatever printed material needs to be displayed. A video camera, attached near the ceiling, is aimed at the table.

The basic game scenario—“believable; real and projected world tensions, activities, and policies,” according to a Pentagon description—sets up a crisis situation, generally a year or more in the future. The staff may work as long as six months developing the basic scenario. Researchers often go overseas to interview U.S. ambassadors, senior military commanders, and experts on the region that is the setting for the scenario. They may even gather information on the performance of specific weapons—“to the trench level.”